Xen 4.5 Development Update (GA slip by a week)

[konrad.wilk@oracle.com]

Xen 4.5-rc4 was out on Monday (Dec 15th). The GA
General Release is on Jan 7th^H^H^14th!

There are some outstanding patches on which we need to figure
out whether we will commit them in or not.

When we commit a patch in, the OSSTest takes a day or so to push it to 'master'
- and if it fails during that time patches that are later in the sequence are
not applied. Hence if everything works out great - we get the patches
to show up next day - however if something breaks - we are stalled.

Ian(s) has pointed to me that the OSSTest is sometimes on the fritz and that it
might take more than one day to push patches through which means we won't
make it by Wednesday.

As such, moving it the release by a week to give us ample room to get through
those changes.

These are the patches that need to be investigated whether they should
go in or not:

 VT-d: don't crash when PTE bits 52 and up are non-zero
 VT-d: extend XSA-59 workaround to XeonE5 v3 (Haswell)
 VT-d: make XSA-59 workaround fully cover XeonE5/E7 v2
 x86/VPMU: Clear last_vcpu when destroying VPMU
 tools/hotplug: add wrapper to start xenstored
 tools/hotplug: remove EnvironmentFile from xen-qemu-dom0-disk-backend.service
 tools/hotplug: use XENCONSOLED_TRACE in xenconsoled.service
 tools/hotplug: use xencommons as EnvironmentFile in xenconsoled.service
 tools/hotplug: xendomains.service depends on network
 tools/hotplug: remove XENSTORED_ROOTDIR from xenstored.service
 tools/hotplug: remove SELinux options from var-lib-xenstored.mount
 tools/libxl: Use of init()/dispose() to avoid leaking libxl_dominfo.ss
 xen: arm: correct off-by-one error in consider_module

 
= Timeline =

Xen 4.5 is a 10 month release. The dates are:

* Feature Freeze: 24th September 2014
* First RC: 24th October [Friday!]
* RC2: Nov 11th
* RC2 Test-day: Nov 13th
* RC3: Dec 3rd.
* RC3 Test-day: Dec 4th
* RC4: Dec 15th
* RC4 Test-day: Dec 17th

<==== WE ARE HERE ===>

 Release Date: Jan 14th.